Turning CRM Data into Deep Customer Insights

The world is becoming increasingly personalized.  Frequent flier numbers and customer membership programs enable companies to track consumers' buying patterns; social media platforms and digital marketing channels enable them to know even more about our preferences and lives.  The door has been opened to inappropriate uses of this information, as evidenced by the "fake news" and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandals from the 2016 election.  But far more commonly, companies are using customer data in legitimate to personalize their communications with customers, with significant results. Customers are happy for you to know about them According to Accenture, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data in order to enable a personalized B2C experience, and 91% say it actually impacts their buying habits.  For B2B purposes, companies have long known there is easy access to public data about them, so any gain in efficiency is welcomed from suppliers who make use of [...]

By |2020-02-24T10:17:03-06:00February 19th, 2020|Artificial Intelligence, CRM Systems, Digital Transformation, Innovation|
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CRM Adoption Needs Good Leadership as Much as Good IT

Over 90% of companies with dedicated sales teams have licensed a CRM system, and yet far fewer of these companies believe their CRMs are strategic in their impact to the top and bottom lines.  Quora got double-digits responses to the question "Why do salespeople hate CRM?"  "Why do salespeople love CRM?" had not been posted as a question as of the time of this writing. Why is it so challenging to get sales teams to use CRM systems? Contrary to some other commentators on this topic, I don't believe the problem of low CRM adoption is due mainly to the systems being overly complex, or salespeople having limited grasp of software generally.  Don't get me wrong; some CRMs are no doubt too complex, designed by techies without sufficient input from real sales teams, etc.   There are over 300 different CRM systems in the market today, and no doubt some are [...]

By |2020-02-29T08:21:03-06:00January 16th, 2020|Artificial Intelligence, Assessments, CRM Systems, Digital Transformation, Innovative Success|
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Early AI Won’t Reach Professionals’ IQ. Build it Anyway

When you teach your children how to read, you don’t hand them a dictionary. You start with one letter, then move on to the next, hoping you know enough words that describe the letter “X” and can create a system from which they will learn on their own. No one expects a toddler to suddenly pick up the morning paper and process the symbols inked onto the page into useable information—but even knowing that, they begin the long, tedious, (painful?) steps to ensure that one day their child, years down the road, can read the morning paper if they so choose. The results are worth the pain in the end. Yet when people hear about the developments of AI in business, many of them assume the process is pointless if the technology has not reached a level of newspaper-reading, so to speak. What would be the point of investing money [...]

By |2019-09-19T04:54:21-06:00August 1st, 2019|Artificial Intelligence, Innovation|
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